peopleSiegfried Seligmann

Seligmann was born at Wandsbek on 12 June 1870 and practised in Hamburg. An eye doctor writing about the eye that harms is a coincidence he does not seem to have made much of; what he did was read everything. "Der böse Blick und Verwandtes" in 1910 was followed by "Die Zauberkraft des Auges und das Berufen" in 1922 and, after his death on 10 November 1926, by "Die magischen Heil- und Schutzmittel aus der unbelebten Natur" in 1927 — the protective and healing materials drawn from the mineral world.

He married Alice Bettina Warburg in 1904, and the family connection shows in where his papers went. His ethnological library was taken into the Warburg Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in Hamburg; since 1987 his papers have been held by the Warburg Institute in London. The amulet collection itself was bought in 1927 for Hamburg's ethnological museum.

The German Wikipedia entry records that his Hamburg residence later became a Judenhaus — one of the buildings into which Jewish residents were forced under Nazi persecution. That happened after his death.

Inference — the reason this atlas cites Seligmann rather than paraphrasing him is that his footnotes name sources this project can chase; he was compiling, not theorising, and the compilation is what has lasted.

The books are in German and mostly untranslated, which is why English writing on the eye tends to reach for Elworthy's 1895 volume first even though Seligmann's is larger and later. His collection and his papers sit in two different cities and two different countries, which is the ordinary fate of a private amulet collection.